Recently Hájek prophesied that “as fans of the Friday the 13th series know, you should never be surprised if Jason suddenly reappears in a new guise – and the same is true for Stalnaker’s Thesis” (Hájek, 2011, p. 14). So what better day to pick for a plea for the thesis than today? Obviously, a new guise is also needed for the thesis; it cannot live on in the way as it is understood in the triv...

This paper compares a number of recently proposed models for computing context sensitive word similarity. We clarify the connections between these models, simplify their formulation and evaluate them in a unified setting. We show that the models are essentially equivalent if syntactic information is ignored, and that the substantial performance differences previously reported disappear to a lar...

This tutorial will describe the use of a factored probabilistic sequence model for parsing speech and text using a bounded store of three to four incomplete constituents over time, in line with recent estimates of human shortterm working memory capacity. This formulation uses a grammar transform to minimize memory usage during parsing. Incremental operations on incomplete constituents in this t...

If A is a context-free language over a two-letter alphabet, then the set of all words obtained by sorting words in A and the set of all permutations of words in A are context-free. This is false over alphabets of three or more letters. Thus these problems illustrate a difference in behavior between twoand three-letter alphabets. The following problem appeared on a recent exam at Cornell: Let be...

Let us call such words relational words and let us, following linguistic custom, call the unexpressed relata implicit arguments. The phenomenon, under various names, has been the object of study since the inception of generative linguistics. Building on the observations of Charles Fillmore (1986), Barbara Partee (1989), David Dowty (1982), Kent Bach (1994) and others, I shall show that implicit...

In this paper, we introduce the notions of context-sensitive and TOL collage grammars as generalizations of context-free collage grammars. Both kinds of picture generating devices are more powerful than the context-free case. Nevertheless, the sizes of collages in a TOL collage language can be shown to grow at most exponentially. In contrast to this, there are no such bounds for context-sensiti...

The present paper introduces and discusses generalized scattered context grammars that are based upon sequences of productions whose left-hand sides are formed by nonterminal strings, not just single nonterminals. It places two restrictions on the derivations in these grammars. More specifically, let k be a positive integer. The first restriction requires that all rewritten symbols occur within...

It is well known that, for context-free grammars, a leftmost derivation of a sentence univocally defines its syntactical tree; the construction of this tree consists of an iterative procedure during which two successive strings in the leftmost derivation are compared (see, e.g., [1, 2]). These -o r similar--properties do not hold for leftmost derivations in general phrase-structure grammars [3-...

This paper discusses the terminating derivation mode in cooperating distributed grammar systems where components are forbidding grammars instead of context-free grammars. Such systems are called forbidding cooperating distributed grammar systems, and it is demonstrated that the number of their components can be reduced to two without changing the generative power and that these systems are comp...

This paper presents an approach for representing, and providing computer support for, the configuration of interactive systems, particularly ubiquitous systems, that offers a flexible method for combining a wide range of configuration techniques. There are many existing techniques offering dynamic adaptation, ranging from fully automatic through context-sensitive to userdriven. We propose a mod...